Combos are a tricky thing in Mortal Kombat 11. If you’re a complete newbie to the Mortal Kombat series, or if you’re jumping in after playing other fighting games like Street Fighter, you might be experiencing some serious combo issues. Some combos are totally fine — but others? It feels impossible to string together the inputs properly.

There are two reasons for that. First; Mortal Kombat 11 (and previous games in the rebooted series) use a Dial-A-Combo system. That means you’ll literally ‘dial’ the combo. The buttons you press to input the combo have nothing to do with the frame data. There is no precise timing — you just need to memorize the combo and input it quickly. That can be a tricky thing for fans of other fighting games that use an alternate system, referred to as Frame Links. In Street Fighter, combo inputs need to be timed to match the actual attacks.

The second reason? You might have a problem with the many, many input settings in the game. There are six primary settings we’re going to look at here — Input Window Timing, Krushing Blows Held Check, Release Check, Alternate Control, Input Shortcuts, and Button Shortcuts.

To access Controller Settings, open the Pause Menu and select “Controls“. There are six settings that change the way you play. By default, some of these settings might actually make your game harder to play.

As with anything, I recommend testing all of these settings, one-at-a-time. Some are hard to recognize any different at all. Others are designed to improve your experience with controllers, or with a joystick.

Toggle OFF Release Check

The worst of these settings is “Release Check” — toggle it OFF. Designed for joysticks, this setting is referred to as (Negative Edge) — when inputting a special move, the special move will only execute when buttons are released.

That’s a huge annoyance, and can cause problems with your inputs if you’re pulling off a combo.

Toggle ON Krushing Blow

By default, “Krushing Blow Held Check” should be toggled ON. This forces you to hold the button down to perform a Krushing Blow, making it harder to accidentally execute one.

You only get one Krushing Blow (counter) per battle, so it’s better to save it. If you’re a beginner, it might be a good idea to leave this OFF, then toggle it ON once you’re confident and know when Krushing Blows will pop.

Other Control Settings

The other four controller settings are designed to help with ease-of-use on a controller. I recommend leaving them all on their default settings.

Input Window Timing: Can be set to “Short”, “Medium” or “Long” — Long gives you the most time to input Special Moves. Certain Special Moves with back-forward D-pad movement are very difficult to pull off on “Short”.

Alternate Control: This is purely preference. To make controls easier, Alternate Control when “Off” removes diagonal inputs from Special Moves. As in, you won’t need to roll the D-pad to pull off certain moves.

Input Shortcuts: Another one to leave at default “On”. When on, you aren’t required to be quite as precise with Special Move directional inputs. That’s a lifesaver with a controller.

Button Shortcuts: Finally, this simple function adds alternate multi-button inputs for certain moves — like throws. You can toggle it “Off” if you accidentally execute throws when you don’t want to, but I recommend leaving it “On”.

Those are my recommendations for Control settings. Got your own? Get in touch with us, and we’ll update this article with any new info we can find!